For a while we have been seeing domination in certain SERPS from a single domain. Searchengineland wrote about this problem last month. In their example a single domain was dominating the SERP for “christopher jagmin plates”. It had been bugging me because a single domain can’t the 10 most relevant results for a single query in my mind.

On Friday Matt Cutts tweeted that there was a small algo change last week that will improve the diversity of search results in terms of different domains returned. This seems to have fixed the US SERPS but is it yet to roll out to the UK from what I can see thus far.

US Results

UK Results

Personally I welcome the move as a single domain shouldn’t dominate the SERPS. This is even more important if the business in question has reputation issues. It would simply not protect the consumer enough if a brand SERP was dominated by marketing copy.

It’s also interesting to see the conflicting releases within a few short weeks. On the 20th of last month they released an update that focused on returning more results from a single domain and a month later they seem to reversing that. Is more to come on this one?

Louis Venter is the founding director and CEO of MediaVision, a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) company specialising in all areas of search. His particular interests are organic search marketing, paid search marketing, conversion strategy and online PR.

Annoyingly there are still lots of examples in the US of terrible serps with little to no domain diversity. In fact, Search Engine Roundtable just gave this as an examplehttps://www.google.com/search?q=bobs+furniture . I really hope when this rolls out in the UK it’ll be a silver bullet, but the US results seem to have only been fixed in a minority of cases unfortunately.

cjvannette

I suspect Google is trying to figure out when surfers want domain diversity and when they really don’t care.